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JUST AS THE discoveries a scientist makes while working for a research company belong to the company, the accounts that are brought in and sold by your sales team are the company’s assets.
This is a sensitive subject. Salespeople feel that accounts they bring in or even accounts that are given to them to work are their accounts. We want salespeople to feel this way. We want them to have a personal stake in the success of the relationship with the customer. But we must be clear that there are no “life-time assignments.” Accounts must be worked and developed or reassigned.
Complacency of ownership will lead to a stagnation of your team’s sales increases and calcification of their sales skills. No one on your team, even and sometimes especially, the most experienced, will know how to find, much less, grow new business.
When we create a culture of account rotation, sales activity will intensify. Salespeople will know that they can’t “desk-drawer” potentially great accounts for their individual rainy day. New sellers will feel they have a chance to grow. Hoarding accounts is real and demotivating to your new sellers and experienced sellers alike—even those currently abusing the system.
Key Account Management
The sales manager should have a personal relationship with the “Pareto’s Peak” of your total account base. Eighty percent of your company’s sales are coming from 20% of the total accounts worked.
If the salesperson is the only one paying attention to the account then the loyalty will be only to the salesperson. The sales manager’s ongoing relationship with these key accounts will help the seller; customers like attention from all levels of our company—it makes them feel important—and will create loyalty to your company as well as the salesperson.
Master Sellers Beware
If you are a Master Seller, you are running out of time. When we get past the journeyman phase of our careers, we are now in the leverage business; we have sold ourselves out of time. So we must spend it (leverage it) with better accounts. Too many Master Sellers see their business plateau and decline not because they aren’t great sellers, but because they are working an account base that isn’t growing or has faded from being hugely profitable to marginally so. These sellers wake up one day too late and have a lot of ground to make up.
Sales at First Sight
How long should we work an account before we reassign? Master Sellers work accounts for much less time than their struggling counterparts. Master Sellers know they are good—they are already selling others successfully. They take rejection less personally and move on more quickly.
We should do the same as companies and make account rotation a part of a sales growth culture. I have asked thousands of salespeople, “How long did it take you to begin to do some business with your best accounts?” About 99% say less than six months.
We invert the math. If an account isn’t doing solid business with us in six months, they never will. We cannot delude ourselves otherwise. There are exceptions, but we cannot build a business on exceptions. Play ’em or trade ’em. Letting your sales team (letting is the same as making it “company policy”) work accounts unprofitably for more than six months is costing you and your team money.
One hundred percent of the lumber salespeople in North America—be it mill, distribution or office wholesale sellers—make 80% of their sales to five accounts or less. Ninety percent of their business comes from fewer than 10 accounts! The crazy thing is if you ask a salesperson how many accounts they are working, they will tell you 30 to 50.
Think of this terrible loss of potential. Each of your salespeople is profitably selling fewer than 10 accounts. How much growth are you leaving in the field un-worked and untapped? How can this be? There is a big difference between having an account “on your screen” or “in your account box” and being profitable.
Creating an environment where everyone on the team knows that accounts will be sold, grown or rotated—there will be no hoarding of accounts—is the number one thing managers can do to create a culture of growth, period.
– James Olsen is principal of Reality Sales Training, Portland, Or., and creator of SellingLumber.com. Call him at (503) 544-3572 or email james@realitysalestraining.com.
